It’s fitting that the single word that would appropriately describe the life of Peter Drouyn, is the exact same word needed to describe a new documentary about him – astonishing. For twelve long years, Jamie Brisick and Alan White have laboured over what is much more than just another sporting hero biopic. The closest thing I have ever seen to The Life & Death of Westerly Windina (2024) is the much-lauded documentary Crumb (1994) -about illustrator extraordinaire Robert Crumb. Controversial psychologist Jordan Peterson has described Crumb as the best documentary about the relationship between mental illness and creativity. The Life & Death of Westerly Windina is just as good as Crumb.
Being a grommet in the late sixties and early seventies, it was impossible for me not to be aware of Peter Drouyn. The extraordinarily handsome, scruffy blonde Queenslander with a toothy smile was just as photogenic on the land as in the water. But the stylish power surfer, who, according to David ‘Baddy’ Treloar, mastered both backhand and forehand tube riding before anyone else, was strikingly different to everyone in the Australian surf scene. Mocked for being an egotist, his varied contributions to surfing were often misinterpreted as merely attention-seeking instead of the products of the hyperactive mind of a genius. I was disappointed in the industry at the time for raining shit on the theatrics of one of our own. After all, Peter Drouyn made life more interesting, more colourful.
I loved it when he acted and danced in the Bob Evans film Drouyn and Friends (1974), but not as much as I loved his super-choreographed leg-ropeless backhand attack at Uluwatu in Bali. As a thirteen-year-old sitting in the audience, I imagined him practising his surfing in his living room, visualising himself outperforming Stephen Cooney and Rusty Miller in Morning of the Earth.
Drouyn’s sense of the dramatic was bigger than surfing. The fact that he studied acting at NIDA and got a few gigs in films and on television is a single paragraph in a resume that stretches on for pages. Drouyn was so far ahead of the curve on so many occasions that it took Australian surfing decades to catch up with him. Such were the times that being a prodigy in ‘The Lucky Country’ was to be misunderstood, mocked, and maligned.
The Life & Death of Westerly Windina painstakingly documents Peter’s early childhood trauma and his escapist abilities as a comedic mimic. He’s so good at it that he appears to dissociate when in character; like it’s a relief to play somebody else – someone in less psychological and emotional pain. This is an inflection point in his life where he gains the much sought-after recognition he craves. This film is as much about a man’s search for his own identity as any I’ve ever seen. It’s so paradoxical – like a Shakespearian tragedy. He’s equally blessed and cursed. It’s as if he’s balancing the highs and lows of his life like a master storyteller acting in his own production. Thankfully, there’s plenty of triumph to counterbalance the hardship and humiliation. This is after all, Peter Drouyn against the world, as much as it is, the world against Peter Drouyn.
The film’s real strength lies in its guiding us to an understanding of why Peter is how he is. By the end of the movie, one could no more judge Peter for being an egotist than one could judge anyone for suffering from visionary genius. This film encourages us to not only stop judging Peter, but to stop judging others more broadly. Not only that, but it also convinces us that we must encourage one another, no matter what our predicament. It does this deftly, by observing the strained but enduring familial relationships key to Peter’s survival.
The film’s first half concentrates on Peter’s family life, his success as a surfer, and his forays into acting, law and engineering. It’s a means to an end whenever he hops out of his well-defined pro-surfer lane. But it would be an error to see this as purely seeking attention. Like any creative, he needs to see his ideas realised, or he feels he has betrayed himself and his gifts. He has had more fantastic ideas for surfing than anyone else ever has, including introducing surfing to China and a Wave Pool Stadium, thirty years ahead of everyone else; two ideas that might soon be co-mingled. One of his ideas that was successfully implemented was Man on Man surfing. Then there was what many saw as the delusional psychoticism of his ‘Super Challenge’ to Mark Richards at the height of MR’s powers. Despite what many said about him at the time, it was a contest he had a chance of winning, while simultaneously reinventing competitive surfing. But these were only some of the hundreds of revolutionary ideas that he had. Drouyn was no wallflower or shrinking Violet. Far from it, he was a Helianthus giganteus; a giant sunflower in full bloom.
If that wasn’t enough, around halfway through the film, Peter Drouyn becomes a woman. The filmmakers intimately follow his crossdressing transformation into his alter-ego Westerly Windina, his agonising decision to have life-changing gender reassignment, and his re-transition back into Peter. Before detransitioning, at the ‘Lifetime Achievement Awards Night’, Westerly, gowned up and mimicking Marilyn Monroe, shines like a beacon of seemingly endless creative effervescence among a school of crusty old, tired sand-sharks. It’s as if she’s glowing, luminescent despite the drab ordinariness of her surroundings. At odds with the notoriously close-minded Queensland of yesteryear.
By the film’s end, one feels privileged to have been invited into the life of such an extraordinary individual as Peter Drouyn. He is by far the most colourful flower in the hothouse of exotic flora that is Australian surfing. It can’t have been easy for him to be tortured by the weight of physical beauty, athletic mastery and creative genius in a country far from ready for such a maverick. But if it’s any consolation, he paved the way for the many creatives of surfing who have audaciously followed his hero’s journey through the long dark night of the soul and adventured into parts of the surfing universe most others dare not even dream about.
During the final shot, while Peter is body surfing on the Gold Coast, I couldn’t help but think that he still has a few surprises left in him. As the credits rolled, I imagined him becoming an exuberant born-again Christian minister, like Little Richard, and herding the surfing world to salvation. Or starring in his own television series, as a world-weary Columbo-like private investigator, with a gift for mimicry and the undercover infiltration of the criminal underworld. He’s the dead-set Madonna or Lady Gaga of surfing. Giving hope to the hopeless. Considering his ability to reinvent himself, I’ll stay tuned for future developments.
The Life & Death of Westerly Windina, with its namesake’s attention to detail, is as groundbreaking and important as the seminal work Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament (1996) by American psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison; with its extensive case studies of historic writers, artists, and composers assessed as probably having had cyclothymia, major depressive disorder or manic-depressive/bipolar disorder.
To say that we owe Peter Drouyn and the filmmakers a debt of gratitude is a monumental understatement. Something that will be proven increasingly, and unceasingly, over time.
